Achievement of Minimum Seismic Damage for Zipper Braced Frames Based on Uniform Deformations Theory

When structures are subjected to strong ground motion excitations, structural elements may be prone to yielding, and consequently experience significant levels of inelastic behavior. The effects of inelastic behavior on the distribution of peak floor loads are not explicitly accounted for in current seismic code procedures. During recent years, many studies have been conducted to develop new design procedures for different types of buildings through proposing improved design lateral load patterns. One of the most important parameters of structural damage in performance-based seismic design is to limit the extent of structural damages (maximum inter-story ductility ratio) in the system and distribute them uniformly along the height of the structures. In this paper, a practical method is developed for optimum seismic design of zipper-braced frames (ZBF) subjected to seismic excitations. More efficient seismic design is obtained by redistributing material from strong to weak parts of a structure until a state of uniform ductility ratio (damage) prevails. By applying the proposed design algorithm on 5, 10 and 15‐storey zipper-braced frames subjected to 10 synthetic seismic excitations, the efficiency of the proposed method is investigated for specific synthetic seismic excitations. The results indicate that, for a constant structural weight, the structures designed according to the proposed optimization algorithm experience up to 50% less global ductility ratio (damage) compared with code-based design structures.